Friday, June 06, 2008

We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel was a Czech writer and dramatist who became so angered by the oppression of the Communist government of the UUSR that his anger and sense of drove him all the way to the Presidency of his country.

Vaclav Havel was no career politician. He was a man shaken but not bowed by the events of his time. He was a man in whom anger lit a sense of purpose. He was a man driven by the righteous idea that every individual on the Earth was born endowed with the unalienable right to freedom.

In these decadent times when powerful people in the West cannot conceive ofany response to totalitarian jihad other than rank appeasement, and when thename of Che Guevara, a bloodthirsty Stalinist and enemy of freedom, issynonymous with heroism, it is vital that free people be familiar with — andhonor — the examples of those valiant few who, living under totalitarianism,have stood up to it with a courage that today’s appeasers of Islam could hardlyimagine.

Among the greatest of these heroes is Vaclav Havel.

Born in 1936, Havel spent his early years under the two majortwentieth-century varieties of totalitarianism — first Nazism, then Communism.When the Communists took over Czechoslovakia after World War II, instituting asystem under which, as Havel biographer Edá Kriseová writes, “[e]veryone wasafraid of his neighbor” and “[p]eople disappeared without a trace,” theyconfiscated the Havel family’s money and the theater they owned.

In 1949, Havel’s father was imprisoned and interrogated for several weeks;three years later, the Havels’ home and possessions were taken from them as partof a new policy under which class enemies were to be removed from Prague. Newsof the latter development gave Havel’s maternal grandfather a stroke from whichhe died; meanwhile Havel’s uncle Miloš, after spending two years in prison andlabor camp as punishment for having run a movie studio, escaped to West Germanywith the help of American troops — whereupon his name, according to Kriseová,was “erased from the history of Czech film.”

Prohibited from being a full-time university student because he was theson of bourgeois parents, Havel cobbled together an education by working as achem lab apprentice, attending night classes, and studying economics and, later,drama. In 1952, when Havel was sixteen, the Czechoslovak government triedthirteen people on trumped-up charges of conspiracy to overthrow the Communistregime. The questions and answers were scripted, the defendants found guilty(the verdict, of course, having been preordained), and all but two of theconvicts executed, their ashes, as Kriseová writes, “shoveled into sacks andscattered on an icy side road in the outskirts of Prague.”

This was only one of many “crazed experiment[s] in the arts of legalizedterror” that took place in Czechoslovakia at the time, the purpose of which wasnot to punish real criminals or dissidents but to maintain an atmosphere ofterror and reaffirm the state’s power to do what it pleased. Such “experiments”had the desired effect: most people in Czechoslovakia kept a low profile. Butnot Havel: determined to work in the theater, he continued to write plays —mostly critiques of Communist utopianism and dogmatism — even though theirproduction and publication were banned.

Then, in 1968, something remarkable happened: the “Prague Spring,”during which Alexander Dubček’s government lifted censorship and travelrestrictions and granted freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. But not forlong: Russian tanks moved in, and Dubček was handcuffed and shipped to Moscow,where he was interrogated, isolated, threatened, bullied, and humiliated. Afterhe finally agreed to sign a document capitulating entirely to the Kremlin, hewas allowed to fly back to Prague, where he sobbed his way through a radiospeech announcing his capitulation. The Communists then proceeded to whipCzechoslovakia back into line by (among other things) purging most governmentministers, top diplomats, and company officials; firing thousands of teachers,school principals, and professors; persecuting actors and artists; forcingalmost half of the country’s journalists to resign and replacing everybody atthe management level of news organizations; dismissing the great majority ofwriters from the Writers’ Union, imprisoning or exiling many of them, andremoving books by scores of them (including Havel) from libraries.

The lesson was clear: in the words of Havel biographer John Keane, thepeople of Czechoslovakiawere expected to join what Havel’s friend Ivan Klímacalled the “community of the defeated,” and to abide by its basic rules: thatthere would only ever be one governing party, to which everything, includingtruth itself, belonged; that the world was divided into enemies and friends ofthe Party and, accordingly, that compliance with Party policies was rewarded,dissent penalized; and, finally, that the Party no longer required the completedevotion of its subjects, only the quiet acceptance of its dictates.

It is a mark of Havel’s character that whenCzechoslovak officials, eager to be rid of him (one of the country’s leadingtroublemakers), actually offered to let him move to the West and take a dreamjob he had been offered with the New York Shakespeare Festival, Havel, who atthe time was working in a brewery, refused. “The solution to this humansituation,” he wrote, “does not lie in leaving it.”

Years passed. Organized dissent in Czechoslovakia disappeared. Then, in 1976, a rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe wasarrested. The musicians were not dissidents, or even politicallyinclined; but in the eyes of the Communist leaders, their music was, inand of itself, subordinate. The group’s arrest underlined the fact thatwhat was at issue in Communist Eastern Europe was not simply the right topolitical dissent — it was the right simply to be oneself, to spread one’swings, to do one’s thing.

The trial led Havel and others to found Charter 77, a group that called onthe government to live up to its obligations under international human rightsagreements. It was a new tactic:

Czechoslovakia’s leaders, like the heads of other Communist countries, hadentered into a number of such agreements, of which their very system ofgovernment was, of course, a violation; signing them was an act of pure cynicismon which no one had ever challenged them.

At first the Plastics didn’t even know whether to align themselves withCharter 77; but they eventually decided to stand up for themselves — and withHavel.

“In this trial,” Kriseová would later write, “the human desire to leadone’s life freely was in the dock. It was a trial in the name of sameness,indifference, bureaucratization, total obedience, and conformity. Anything thatdeviated from the norm in any way had to be liquidated.” Or, in Havel’s words: the trial was “an impassioned debate about themeaning of human existence, an urgent questioning of what one should expect fromlife, whether one should silently accept the world as it is presented to one andslip obediently into one’s pre-arranged place in it, or whether one has thestrength to exercise free choice in the matter.”

Eventually over a thousand people signed Charter 77’s manifesto, andmany were punished severely for it. Havel — already under the watchful eye ofthe Czechoslovak government — became a constant target of its attentions. Thesecret police interrogated him regularly. “He received threatening letters andanonymous telephone calls,” writes Keane.

His life began to feel as if it was one continuous round of threats,bright lights, padded doors, wooden desks, sliding chairs, handcuffs,truncheons. … When it became clear to the authorities that the man was not forgiving up … Havel was arrested, charged … with committing “serious crimesagainst the basic principles of the Republic.” He was confined without trial “intotal isolation” for four and a half months in Ruzyně prison. After his release,he and other Chartists were beaten brutally by police at a ball for railwayworkers.

In all, Havel was imprisoned four times. “Prison hammered into Havel’shide the painful realization that responsibility is the key to human identity,”Keane writes.

Courage did not come easily to Havel. It was a matter of will, ofresolve. In prison, swarming with worries about what prison would do to hissoul, his sense of humor, he struggled to keep up his spirits. … He was riddledwith guilt over having dragged other people into Charter 77. He was deeplysuspicious of utopians with their “radiant tomorrows”:

“What is a concentration camp but an attempt by Utopians to dispose ofthose elements which don’t fit into their Utopia?”

After the Charter’s appeal was made public, the Czechoslovak governmentput together a group of artists, musicians, journalists, and performers whopublicly declared their enthusiasm for the Communist system and who condemnedHavel and others as imperialist agents. To read their testimonies now is to bereminded of today’s Western apologists for jihadism. (The difference, of course,is that the latter, who are not yet living under the totalitarianism they soreprehensibly defend, have less excuse for their cowardice.)

In 1978 Havel wrote a long essay that would have an extraordinaryimpact and that should be required reading in Western schools. “The Power of thePowerless” explained on a profound human level why Communist tyranny should beresisted with all one’s heart and mind and soul.

It wasn’t a dry political treatise — it was a work of deep thought andfeeling that accomplished the apparently impossible: it enabled many EasternEuropeans to look with fresh eyes at the oppression that they had long taken forgranted as the way of the world. And in doing so, it persuaded them to abandontheir meek passivity and stand up for their liberties.

Only on a very few occasions in history has a writer attained a uniqueinsight into his society and expressed it in words that moved mountains; Havelis one such writer. His essay took Eastern Europe by storm. Solidarity memberZbigniew Bujak later said that it came along at a time when he and many of hisfellow Polish activists felt dispirited and had decided that it was pointless tochallenge their Communist masters.

“The Power of the Powerless” changed that. It articulated, in words thattouched them to the core, the spiritual need to resist oppression.

“Reading it,” explained Bujak, “gave us the theoretical underpinnings forour activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later —in August 1980 — it became clear that the party apparatus and the factorymanagement were afraid of us.” Of the spectacular successes of Solidarity inPoland and of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Bujak said, “I see in them anastonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’sessay.”

In the essay, Havel imagined a man who runs a fruit and vegetable stand inCommunist Czechoslovakia (runs, not owns: in Communist Europe, of course, allbusinesses were owned by the state). The man puts in his store window a signbearing a Communist slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why, Havel asked,does he do this? The answer: he’s afraid. He wants to live “in harmony withsociety,” and must prove he’s obedient. Havel noted that such a man mighthesitate, out of shame, to post a sign explicitly admitting his fear; but thesign bearing the Communist slogan helps him conceal his cowardice from himselfby hiding it behind the façade of ideology — an ideology that offers people “theillusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier forthem to part with them.”

Communist ideology, Havel pointed out, obligespeople to “live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough forthem to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact,individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are thesystem.”

Moreover, while life in free societies “moves toward plurality,diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization,” life underCommunism “demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.”

People like Havel’s greengrocer, by going along with all this, become notonly victims of the system’s oppression but also collaborators in it — for thesign in the window, in addition to testifying to the shopkeeper’s meekcompliance, increases pressure on other merchants to put signs in their windowslest the authorities start asking why they haven’t.

So it is that ordinary people, by kowtowing to the system, become itsenforcers. (Thus are the subjects of Communism the equivalent of dhimmis underIslam.)

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Of The Entire World

All of us, every single man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth were born with the same unalienable rights; to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if the governments of the world can't get that through their thick skulls, then, regime change will be necessary.

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IBA Quote of the Week.

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."

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Gathering Storm Report Radio Show

"An Islamic regime must be serious in every field," explained Ayatollah Khomeini. "There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam."

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"I want to be very, very clear, however: I understand and agree with the analysis of the problem. There is an imminent threat. It manifested itself on 9/11. It's real and grave. It is as serious a threat as Stalinism and National Socialism were. Let's not pretend it isn't."~~~~~Bono~~~~~